Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

An anonymous reader writes with some bad news from Italy, noting that new rules proposed there would "require people who upload videos onto the Internet to obtain authorization from the Communications Ministry similar to that required by television broadcasters, drastically reducing freedom to communicate over the Web." Understandably, some say such controls represent a conflict of interest for Silvio Berlusconi, "who exercises political control over the state broadcaster RAI in his role as prime minister and is also the owner of Italy's largest private broadcaster, Mediaset."

steveb3210 (962811) writes "NPR this morning ran a story about how ants in the desert use an internal pedometer to navigate. In the forest ants can rely on their scent trail to lead them back; in the desert wind makes this approach impractical.

It's already known that ants use celestial clues to establish the general direction home, but how do they know exactly the number of steps to take that will lead them right to the entrance of their nest?"

To find out, scientists allowed a group of ants to go off foraging for food; while they were out, they extended the legs of some using sheep hair while shortening the legs of others. After releasing them to return home, it turns out that they all attempted to take the same number of steps on the return journey that it took to arrive. The ants with longer legs overshot the nest while the ants with shorter legs stopped too soon.

After returning them all home and allowing for a good night's sleep, they were again allowed to go out and forage for food retaining their new legs for both the journey and the return. Every ant regardless of leg length managed to make it back to the nest successfully."Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes "Twitter, like many web 2.0 apps, started life as a MySQL based RBDMS application. Today, Twitter is still using MySQL for much of their online operational functionality (although this is likely to change in the near future – think distributed), but on the analytics side of things Twitter has spent the last 6 months moving away from running SQL queries against MySQL data marts. This was because their need for timely data was becoming a struggle with MySQL, particularly when dealing with very large data volumes and complicated queries. For Web 2.0 the ability to understand, quantify and make timely predictions from user behavior is very much their life blood. When Kevin arrived at Twitter 6 months ago he was tasked with changing the way Twitter analyzed their data. Now the bulk of their analytics is executed using a Hadoop platform with Pig as the “querying language”."Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes "The UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) has imposed a fine of nearly £1m on the Nationwide — the largest building society in the country — because of poor controls over data on a laptop that was stolen from an employee's home. The laptop contained data on 11 million customers, but the Nationwide didn't take any action for 3 weeks. There is no evidence that the confidential data was actually used to disadvantage customers.

According to the FSA, the Nationwide: failed adequately to assess the risks in relation to the security of customer information; had procedures in relation to information security which failed adequately and effectively to manage the risks it faced; failed to implement adequate training and monitoring to ensure that its information security procedures were disseminated and understood by staff; and failed to implement adequate controls to mitigate information security risks, to ensure that employees followed its procedures, and to ensure that it provided an appropriate level of information security.

How many other businesses meet the standards of information security excellence demanded by the FSA?"

zeux (129034) writes "While testing the new Paris — Strasbourg line, the TGV broke a 17 years old speed record (babelfish translation), travelling at 553 km/h (343 mph). The last record, of 515 km/h (320 mph), was set on May, 18th 1990. According to the French National Railroad Company (SNCF) the testing campaign will continue and speeds up to 570 km/h (354 mph) could be atteigned by June of this year."